Hi from outside.

While I was standing in line at the cafeteria, back in grade school, a classmate came up behind me and kneed my knee. I folded.

“If it bends,” she said, “that means you’re hungry.”

We were in the cafeteria so um, duh.

But if that’s ever happened to you, then you get it. How easily something responsible for holding up your entire constitution can buckle and give with nothing more than a nudge and a joke.

Today, that was my brain.

It’s Friday. Technically a workday. Well. Technically a holiday. But technically a workday. Or technically? I don't know.

I was meant to work on my own things: in the rare crevice between client work, I found space and time and mental bandwidth; beside them was the obligation to take advantage.

But it was a chill day, and so I asked Mon if he'd like to work at the Garden Level. Find a seat by the pool and do whatever we had to do with hair in our eyes from the breeze, you know?

He said yes. I said yes. I packed a bag of notebooks. We detoured through Starbucks. Detour-detoured through the grocery because we were out of toilet paper. Detour-detour-detoured within the grocery to sneak-grab some snacks. Then finally sat down.

Perfect.

Except. Without client work due, my brain was fogged by possibility. Do I crack open my sketchbook and brainstorm? Do I write an email to my list? Do I, gasp, read a book for fun?

I didn't know where to begin. With so much on my mind on top so much on my mind, I thought perhaps journaling would be a good place to start.

Here’s an excerpt from today’s entry:

The sun has set but it isn’t dark just yet: the sky is the solid blue of a paint bucket fill. The yellow orange duralights outline our buildings in stark contrast. It’s not as windy as we thought it’d be, but there’s something about being here that just feels… better. I don’t think I’d find it in me to write here if I were surrounded by the upstairs.

It’s getting almost too dark to write, but I think I need to exist outside, in these pages, for a little bit longer.

There’s nothing here. And that’s the point.

The sky is the solid blue of a paint bucket fill.

Poetry.

Where’s my Palanca award?

I finished the journal entry as far as I could take myself: as far as I felt safe to express; as far as my hand could keep up with my thoughts.

But it was the catharsis of paper and pen that kneed me from behind. Caught off guard, my brain folded and oh, okay, I guess we’re going this way now. Work? who’s that? I don’t know her. Keep writing. Keep writing. Words. Words. More words. Words.

Not to mix metaphors, but it’s like, I already started peeing, and there’s no holding a pee mid-stream. The words are on their way out — about what? I don’t know! — and I can’t kegel them back into my body.

And so this is where you’ve found me.

Blogging about nothing, just full-on stream of consciousness with Fall Out Boy in my ear (the left), the smell of newly-reconstructed-swimming-pool that refuses to habituate into the smell of nothing in my nose, empty cup of gingerbread latte in front of me, Mon to my right, and the internal oh hey of realizing I didn’t need to insta-poop after that coffee. (Small wins.)

“We can go up na.”

“Can.”

I don’t want to.

But my music stopped because my phone is low batt.

So fine.

I can inertia the other way.

Up we go.